Summary

PANDA-glGo is a 3D and 2D Goban, game viewer, game editor, and client for IGS and interface for GNU Go. It is currently the most attractive and versatile client made specifically for use with IGS[1]. Textures and sound samples help provide a more realistic goban experience.

Problems (and Solutions?)

Mac OS/X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" is sometimes killed by running glGo.

Problem: Mac OS/X 10.6 is known to have issues with older, legacy applications that run under "Rosetta". Unfortunately, glGo seems to be one of these programs...

Specifically, some operation within glGo that happens when you're actively using the program (but not, luckily, during a game so far) brings down your entire user session - resulting in a blue screen and a request to log in again.

All your other applications will terminate abnormally and you might lose work in them.

There's a simple solution to this issue - just recompile the code for Intel processors and it will never happen again. And I'm a programmer, I could do this - it'd be worth my time just to avoid crashing! :-D But there is no visible source code.

Does anyone have a better handle on getting in touch with the maintainer? I don't check this account regularly, but please send contact me at tom (at) swirly (dot) com.

Suggestions:

Email igs-adm (at@) panda-igs.joyjoy.net explaining the issue and asking for it to be passed on to the developer.

Game Window Opens in the Background

Problem: When I search a game with the Search-Game button, the game window opens very often in the background. This can be overlooked (and, after a minute, it leads to losing the game because not placing a stone).

3D-Board Disappears

Problem: (vers. 1.4, 3D-board, winxp) Suddenly the board is away. I switched to an explorer window and when switching back, the board was away, still the (green) background was visible. Closing the board window and re-open it didn't correct this, same with closing the program and restart it. Also no luck with restarting the OS. I tried with settings: switching to 2-D and back to 3-D and no luck.

How did this happen?: The glgo 3-D-board captures the CTRL and SHIFT keys and the mouse movement, when the mouse pointer is on the board frame of the board window (inspite of the focus being on another window). In this way I shoved the board to the side and couldn't retrieve it.

3D-Board Corrupt

Bug: (vers. 1.4, 3D-board, winxp) When two (or more) boards are opened and one becomes closed, the other becomes corrupt: the whole board (including background) changes to dark wine red (just found: it's the colour of the background, when the background bitmap is switched off) and no game play or viewing is possible (places of stones are marked by a black or white thin circle). This does not happen to all boards but only to the board window, which was in front before. It still seems to be 3D. Later opened boards are normal again. (glGo v.1.4, Win98 and xp-sp2, both with modern graphics hardware) -- RueLue (This is not included in the 'Known problems' list of the glGo manual at IGS's.)

I tried this with different win-computers and it is the same with all of them (xp and 98) -- RueLue

Anonymous: I often get display problems, but hitting F5 usually fixes it. Hope this might help someone.

Later: I thought F5 was refresh – it is "show variations". Oops.

Solution: You circumvent the problem, if you minimize (to tray) the still needed board windows of glgo, and resize them after closing the unneeded boards. By the way: in a Mandriva Linux Live CD I found the same display problem (no, I didn't try the trick there). -- RueLue

Solution 2: When you accidentally affected your own game window with this bug, give a notice to your opponent! You need to close the program (6-button-window) and restart the program. This is how I repaired it. When you are back logged in, you press [ctrl]+[s]: this opens your status window (or you go over the menu tools - my stats). The tab 'games' shows in the stored games section your unfinished game. The context menu (right mouse click) has the option to load that game.

Instead, if you like the console, you type: stored
The server answers e.g.: 1 game foundgeneralkey-tanube
and you type in load generalkey-tanube
This does it when your opponent is still online.

Stone disappears while observing

Bug: (vers. 1.4, 3D-board, winxp) Sometimes, when observing a game and going back and forth in the game, you suddenly miss a stone. Going back in the game tree to the moment, when the stone was played, you see only a shadow (ghost stone) for the stone and this disappears, when you go forth. Reproduction of this bug is still unclear, possibly a second game window is involved. In the game tree list (menu View, option Tree list [F8]) a new branch in the list appears; and when you go forth to the beginning of the branch, you see one ghost stone, which changes to a normal stone, the next stone appears as ghost and diappears, when advancing in the game view.

Solution: Close this game window and reopen it. (And if you are observing more games at the same time, see "3D-Board Corrupt".)

Impossible to scroll through a game

Bug: (vers. 1.4, 3D-board, winxp) Sometimes, in one board window (of two or more games being observed) it is not possible to scroll through the game (mouse wheel) and moving through the game with keys is a bit strange: The display doesn't react (stone counter counts) and then, when you hold the key pressed for half a second or so and release it, the board situation shows the position according to the counter.

Time Settings against Gnugo

Can you play with any kind of time settings against gnugo?

In the preferences window the tab 'GNU Go' has the option to give command line parameters. There should be parameters to start GNU go with time restrictions. I didn't try this, you need to look into the documentation for GNU Go. (The glgo manual writes: Clocks are not yet supported.)

Stone and Board Marks

Bug: I'm using the version for Linux, and it won't mark the board or stones. The last stone played won't be marked; if I use the "edit" feature, none of the marks will work. Any ideas on how I can fix this?

Fixed: I tried version 1.4 (Sept. 2008) for Linux, and it is marking the stones and board. It needed libtiff.so.4, which I don't have. I created a symbolic link to libtiff.so.3.

Linux Installer for x86_64

Problem:Anonymous The Linux installer is specific to x86, and there is no installer available for x86_64. I have found a couple of sets of directions on the web for manually installing the deb, but I don't really want to get into that kind of trickery on my system. It is quite frustrating that PandaNet has no FAQ, no source package, and no contact link on the glGo page.

Remarks

Notes on the old open source version

[2]
It seems that the sources to this software are no longer made available since its website was moved to the IGS server.

The old version was under GPL, but the author of the code can re-license at will. If the last free glGo contained no code contributed from others, the relicensing is perfectly legal.

The "sources" link of the website does not give glGo sources. It gives the sources to certain libraries used, combined with compiled object files of glGo, which are being provided to comply with the libraries' licenses.

Peterius: I've been looking for the author of glGo and ran across a mailing list that said that people were using the source of glGo to cheat on IGS by somehow not posting byo yomi times. In my opinion IGS servers should account for this but this is supposedly the reason why the source code has been removed from related sites. A link: http://www.freelists.org/archives/ggo-discussion/04-2003/msg00008.html